At our initial meeting with Joy Askew for the "Scenes From the Hudson" project I felt an easy and relaxed vibe from Joy; turns out we had a very similar musical tastes including a mutual interest in the iconic late-60's rock band Cream - she was a charter member of a fan club for the band while growing up in England and I (15 years after the fact) a Clapton wanna-be guitar player in growing up in Connecticut.
As the instrumentation for our pulse project was finalized and a cello was on the final roster I thought about interesting rock music and cello tunes (aside from Eleanor Rigby) I knew of and thought about "As You Said" from Cream's final recording entitled "Wheels of Fire." Even as a kid I always dug the cello under Jack Bruce's soaring vocal and cryptic lyrics ("Let's go back to where it's clean, to see what time it might have been" - what the F*&^ does that mean?) I figured that in some form I'd draw on that sound for our pulse project.
As Joy and I met in May 2008 to start our collaboration we were focused on creating a back story to a character/mood she offered at the initial pulse meeting - a story of a "loner" Native American from the 17th century infatuated with the water and his canoe on the Hudson. This to me sounded similar to Richard Bach's 1970 classic book Jonathan Livingston Seagull about a seagull ostracized by his flock for his desire to be different etc... (it was a nice book/story and served me well until Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery came along!) I began to think of our pulse project as Jonathan Livingston Native-American.
Our song came together quickly, we basically had the whole thing done in 90 minutes in terms of raw material. Somehow we ended up with a 2-section Bossa Nova groove and chord changes straight out of the Jobim songbook! Never know how things will turn out...
My primary role in the project was then to create an arrangement for the song; it was such a simple piece that I didn't want to get too crazy with it, but it needed to have a distinct shape and flow so as not to be just a "head-solos-head" tune. I was able to incorporate the "vocal-over-cello-thing" mentioned earlier along with Joy's ability to loop tracks of her voice in a solo section of the piece and kinda' went backwards from there, always cognizant of keeping the tune as "the tune" and not getting in thw way of its inherent simplicity. Hope you like it!
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